


Last

by swooning



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-08
Updated: 2015-04-08
Packaged: 2018-03-21 20:49:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3704479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swooning/pseuds/swooning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last thing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last

The sun, rising and setting, giving meaning once more to words like  _morning_  and  _night_.   
  
The strange, enormous moon, almost as great a presence as the sun, dominating the night sky.   
  
The passage of seasons, the fact of unpredictable weather.   
  
The feel of a cool breeze, blessing his face on a hot day.   
  
Most of these things were not new. They were remembered, and fondly; he had experienced them before, lived planetside before. The moon, that was different, but only as a matter of magnitude. He had seen moons nearly as large before, though never one so very large and so serenely alone among the stars.   
  
The idea that the moon was somehow among the stars, because from the perspective of a planet-dweller the sky was essentially two-dimensional, amused him even as it crept into his consciousness. Over time, the knowledge of astronomical distances was overridden by the visual input that told him the stars were painted on a dome overhead. Only occasionally, as time passed, would he be visited with a clear sense that the space above his head was infinite, the distances between the stars fantastically great and only to be conquered by the greatest efforts and constructs of human ingenuity. He allowed himself to wonder whether, millions of years from now, the young race of beings that lived here - or the hybrid race that might evolve from the combination of human, Cylon, and native genes - would once again develop the technology for interstellar travel. Sadly, this would also mean they would probably develop robotics. His wondering always stopped there, and he would walk away from the thought, spend time in his small garden or go hunting for meat to smoke, anything to take his mind away from that future and ground it firmly back in the present.   
  
It wasn't, he discovered, that he couldn't live without her. He lived on in self-evident proof that he could do so. Her last words, her lasting wonder at the abundance of life, made it impossible for him to take his own. He had planned to, and the idea had not frightened him. But when it came time, he realized that to kill himself would have been an insult, a flouting of all she had held dear, of the very thing she had died marveling at.  _Life. Earth_. So it would be part of his gift to her memory, to live out his life here where he fancied she would have wanted to live. Experiencing, for both of them, the life they had fought so hard to secure. In a cabin on a hill with an unobstructed view of the land, of running water, of the parade of life just beyond the front door.   
  
But not human life.   
  
He had known even before he carried her to the Raptor, piloted her on that last journey...or at least as far as he could take her, before their paths diverged and she continued on alone, on that journey that one could only take alone.   
  
He had known he could never return to the camp, to the others, even to his own son, once he boarded that Raptor and flew it away. It was a moot point now, anyway, because once he had landed, and dealt with the frail shell that no longer contained his Laura, he had programmed the Raptor to fly away. If he had done his job correctly it would join its brothers in the forge of the sun, to live forever as new light, new life, for this planet. If he had not, at least the ship would have escaped the gravitational pull of the planet and hopefully the sun, and might simply fly into the night until it ran out of fuel somewhere in the vast distances between the stars. By the time any future beings from this place developed the technology to get that far, the fact of the Raptor would no longer compromise their independent development. It might shock the hell out of them, but that would hardly be Bill's concern. He took a certain satisfaction in it, actually. Let the little frakkers figure  _that_  one out, he thought with a wry chuckle. His parting practical joke on the ages.   
  
Perhaps she was right, and there was another side. If so, he would join her there, and the first thing he would do after holding her for an eternity would be to kiss her for the next eternity while running his fingers through her hair. Their timing had not allowed that, but he gave himself that one whimsical allowance - to imagine that if they were rejoined after his death Laura's hair would surely be restored to her there, and he could finally play with it as he had wanted to since shortly after meeting her. The thought did not make the nights any shorter, however.   
  
But the hair didn't really matter. Her eyes, sparkling as she smiled, her legs that could never quite be believed...didn't really matter. Only one thing did, and if it were all that he could look forward to in the afterlife he now longed to believe in, it would be enough. Fitting, then, that it was the last thing he had of her.   
  
Her voice.  _So much...life_.  
  
He could live without her, although he would spend the rest of his life mourning her, and perhaps let that mourning shorten his life in some way. He would build her cabin - their cabin, it had always been their cabin - and live there. He would sit outside the door, or on the rocky ledge near her grave, talking to her and wondering what she might say in return if she were there. Wishing he could tell her about each new thing he saw.   
  
But he would do all these things alone. He would never seek out the other remnants of the old humanity, nor the new humanity of this planet, for one simple reason. Because he wanted to die knowing that her voice was the last one he ever heard.


End file.
